


A History Of The Greek-Speaking Peoples

by KingAlanI



Category: Civilization (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-26 15:00:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 11,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KingAlanI/pseuds/KingAlanI
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A game of Civilization II in which I played as the Greeks, the history written in character by the current leader in past tense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Empire

Greek Prime Minister Alexander XVII On His Nation

 

Part I – The Empire – From Founding Until 3474 After Founding

 

            Six thousand years ago, a great man rose up on the banks of the River Athena. Emperor Alexander I led the Greek people out of a nomadic lifestyle and it is in his honor that all subsequent leaders of the nation of Athens bear his name.

 

            The founders had realized that man could bend the landscape to his will. Half of our early tribe formed a settlement and the other half continued its travels, to find a place for another. Yet first they laid paths on the north bank of the River Athena. Railroad tracks lay there today instead of crude dirt trails, but our ancestors’ choice of location had proved sound.

 

After building that road, they returned to Athens and floated west on rafts on the River Athena. It turns out the great river did end – it seems silly to believe it did not, but for those early Greeks, those few hundred miles really had been the whole world. Athens had raised a band of Warriors, and they headed east on the river while the Settlers went west. Even then, they were weak combatants, best suited for keeping order over civilians – and exploring. In the west, the River Athena ended in a trickle. In the east, it ended in a massive lake – what we now know as the Greco-Persian Ocean, but then as now, the only realistic way to explain new things is in terms of what one already knows.

 

The northeast had more rich grasslands. That was going to be a fine place for another settlement once Athens produced more restless travelers to establish it. The east had another river. Legend has it that it was discovered four centuries after the founding of Athens, that finding a place much like home, the man leading the settlers stood up and bellowed “This is Sparta!”

 

For centuries, those cities simply grew in place. The people of that era’s Athens and Sparta must’ve found their towns gigantic at three myriads of people each. Now the glorious city has a population of ninety-one myriads, its first brother two hundred and seventy six, in a world full of many settlements that size. Athens began organizing an army of more than ragtag warriors. Our people had known how to fuse copper and tin into bronze since the beginning. We finally started using the alloy for more than trinkets. Explorers near Sparta found a unit of archers that pledged itself to our cause; bows were the guns of their era.

 

Settlers from Athens intended to head to the northeast lands instead went northwest, and so Thermopylae became the third town in the empire, two millennia into its existence. Yet the land now known as the Corinth Peninsula was soon to know Greek civilization.

 

The gods were worshipped by this time, although the great temples had not yet been built. I wasn’t sure whether it was bunk or not, but I was sure it kept the people calm when naked force of soldiers or police wouldn’t suffice. Even in the old days, there were limits to that. And even back then, local productivity was shot to hell when diverting lots of people to entertainment in an attempt to pacify the others.

 

Towards the end of the Imperial Period, there were roads all the way between Sparta and Thermopylae, between Athens and Corinth, but not between the two sets. Then as now, Greece seemed known for its paths. Then as now, not only did it facilitate movement of major units, it was a boon to trade from helping laborers and merchants move goods around. From that stemmed the gold and new ideas that both built our civilization.

 

Following the River Spartacus north, it ended in a trickle as did the west side of the River Athena. However, that was near the southern coast of another massive lake and in the middle of yet more fertile grasslands. Between the river and the lake was perfect territory for the settlement that became known as Delphi.

 

The land had many plots of trees and the coasts had some collections of mighty sea beasts, so the empire could build things instead of simply eat. One of the forests to the southwest of Athens had worms that produced a fabric that was sturdy, yet smooth and beautiful. That would be one of the many trade items on which our empire was built.

 

The first legal inscriptions appeared around this time – a haphazard set of early Greek letters, but the closest thing the empire had yet had to writing. Greek coinage was also new during this era, and bore some of the same letters. A single drachma was a copper-plated zinc trinket now, but back then, it was a reasonably substantial silver piece about the size of the modern copper five drachmae. A few of those early stamped lumps are some of the most prized property of the governmental historical museum. Though now our coinage is precisely machined with more detailed inscriptions, we still use much the same design with the goddess Athena’s head on one side and an owl on the other side.

 

The Greeks of that time could see much unsettled land to the north and south of the empire, and some to the west. Even those early leaders had dreams of expanding our territory to fill what we now know as the Greek Continent, but they hadn’t thought of lands beyond it. It was harrowing enough for the Greek men of the time to travel a short distance from the shore in search of fish.

 

The Emperor’s power had been absolute; our wise men had been developing a system that still had a single powerful leader, but with more control granted to the local aristocrats. This seems backwards now, for even the Greeks were not always the most civilized of men, but what would be known as Monarchy would be the next step in the development of our people. Acting in their own self-interest, those local lords would ensure that better use was made of the great resources of our land.


	2. Empire

Part II – The Kingdom – From 3475 After Founding to 4220 After Founding

 

            King Alexander I succeeded an innumerable Emperor Alexander to the rule of Greece. The empire turned kingdom still took up only the central third of what we now know as Greece. Some irrigation infrastructure to the northeast of Thermopylae would be the first part of the Greek realm to take advantage of the efficiency of the local aristocrats’ management, on their monarchs’ behalf or on their own behalf. For the sake of the Greeks, it worked.

 

            The kingdom didn’t expand much after the crowning of the first King Alexander, just gathering its strength where it lay. The only new colony in the first six centuries was Pharsalos, slightly to the south of Sparta and west of Delphi. However, after that, the kingdom soon began expanding beyond the narrow central portion of the Greek continent. Within mere decades of the establishment of Pharsalos, Knossos rose in the north and Argos in the south.

 

            Yet a more important structure was rising in Athens – Marco Polo’s Embassy. It would be a way for traders to contact peoples from all over the world on behalf of the Kingdom of Greece. The kings Alexander of the time, for construction lasted through multiple realms, realized that they might know things that even our wisest men didn’t, and we would know things those foreigners didn’t. The Greeks had never built such a massive structure before, but travelers had distributed rumors of different projects of comparably wondrous scale in other lands. Those travelers might be some of the very same people the Embassy would utilize. Today, such travel simply requires a tolerance for planes. Then, it required balls of bronze, steel not having been invented yet.

 

            Most of our rulers were enlightened men then as now, and most of the wise men were wise enough to understand the value of advertising intelligence. _Supposedly the smarter the man the larger his penis and the greater his ability to use it. Smart men were still men._ However, the latter often didn’t work. Even more so then than now, brawn was often admired to the exclusion of brains.

 

Well, the ranks of the Greek Army could organize such men and channel their tendencies to the national good. Barracks and bronzesmiths in the East raised divisions upon divisions of phalanxes, some to garrison their home cities and some to travel across the great Greek roads to guard the rest of the Kingdom. Not knowing of external enemies, they served mainly to maintain public order amongst a growing populace. Also, a military, then as now, had to protect its government and people from unknown threats as well as customizing plans to known threats. Brawn was even more important to the force back then. It took an incredible amount of strength to carry the sheer weight of the era’s weapons and armor, and to use those weapons – draw the bow, swing the blade or bludgeon. Our army was still the world’s gold standard of physical fitness, don’t get me wrong, but rifles and bulletproof vests did not place such demands on their users.

 

The completion and opening of Marco Polo’s Embassy was truly one of the greatest moments in the history of the Greek civilization. It seemed our wise men had learned as much in those few years as they had in the preceding thousands, and they taught the world what we knew. Such spread of knowledge would benefit all of humanity, even the non-Greek parts of it. It would save our wise men the time researching such concepts themselves, and hopefully enable them to study the most advanced concepts in the world. The wise men of the other nations would likely share such ideas amongst themselves anyway, or discover them on their own. So the Greeks might as well get what we could for such knowledge first. That strategy held true until nearly the present day.

 

Boadicea of the Celts, Tokugawa of the Japanese, Louis of the French, Cleopatra of the Egyptians, Xerxes of the Persians and Indira of the Indians all became familiar to our people at that time.

 

They would not become intimately familiar to our military personnel for several centuries, and that seemed just as well to me, for the prudent leader would not try to destroy another nation to add to the glory of his own when the attempt stood such a high chance of destroying his own. There was of course the risk of counterattack, but also of expending the nation’s men and resources in a futile endeavor.

 

Some less literate Greeks minced Boadicea’s name as ‘bulldyker’, and combined with rumors about a woman powerful enough to command an empire, language was given the ‘dyke’ slang for women attracted to other women. I wondered what her husband thought of that when the talk made it back to Celtic territories. I also wondered why the Greeks found the rumor denigrating, considering the verses of Sappho. Well, her name or the name of her home island Lesbos off the eastern coast were more often used for the practice amongst Greeks themselves, ‘dyke’ used for foreigners of a similar mind. Such dismissive behavior made it clear that not all Greeks were so enlightened as we fancied ourselves to be.

 

Around this time, the Greek letters finally began to be organized into writing, so at this point my history starts to become much more complete with more material to draw on. It must’ve been hard to keep track of the sheer volume of the new knowledge of the time, but The Republic stood out. As a monarchy granted some control to local lords, a republic further spread out power amongst many common people. The same spirit of reform that replaced an emperor with a king would replace a king with what would be called a ‘consul’, chosen by the people rather than by his father’s taste in wives. King Alexander XXVIII explaining his abdication would become one of the first great works of Greek literature, and of political theory anywhere in the world.


	3. Early Republic

**Part III – Early Republic - From 4300 After Founding to 5120 A.F.**

 

The first Greek Republic was proclaimed after decades of revolution following King Alexander XXVIII’s legendary abdication. The wise men calculated that it was 4300 years from when Emperor Alexander I crowned himself.

 

Many local rulers resented losing their power and mobilized to fight against such; however, many arguments had to do with the exact mechanisms of how the common people would choose their leaders.

 

The larger cities felt that their higher populations made their concerns proportionally more important. The smaller cities obviously did not agree. They did not want to be part of a nation whether they were legally overwhelmed by their larger brethren, and felt their territory was also of vital importance to the country.

 

After all, the land area around each settlement was and still is roughly equal except for the few cities particularly close to each other, notably Mycenae and Thessalonica. The inland cities Athens, Sparta and Thessalonica pointed out that the rest were surrounded by mostly water. The coastal cities argued that their seafaring trade, especially in whale products, was also of vital national interest.

 

It was determined that larger cities would have more votes, but not proportionally more, and that territory would not count except in how it affected population growth. The first myriad would lead to one vote, but it would take two more myriads for the city to have a total of two votes, three more than that to earn a third vote, and so on and so forth. That formula, more than a millennium and a half old, is still used today.

 

The charter of the country called for counting citizens every twenty years for this purpose, and further explained _Until such enumeration shall be made, the City of Athens shall be entitled to chuse_ [sic] _six, Sparta three, Thermopylae five, Corinth three, Delphi three, Pharsalos two, Knossos two and Argos two._ So the first Senate sat with twenty-six men.

 

The Greek national legislature has grown since then, and seated quite a few women. The chamber still does not seat as many as the gynaikists would like. Admittedly, their point seemed understandable. Women still amounted to far less than half of the Senators. This was more of a difference than could be explained by other factors. Greeks would see this if they cared to, although a proper education in statistics aided this realization.

 

However, the tradition of obstructing the consul or prime minister has remained much the same since those early days. That was a key part of their role, as grudgingly as I the Prime Minister admit it. At least there hadn’t been any war efforts for them to interfere with at the time.

 

Greek explorers soon learned you couldn’t go much further north on the continent than Knossos. However, astronomical observations already indicated by that time that our homeland was near the south of the world.

 

This was further confirmed by the maps the Embassy traders brought back – we traded cartographical knowledge with the foreigners as well as the results of scientific inquiry. This saved us so much trouble fielding a fleet of ships and stumbling around the world, especially given the rickety triremes of the age. To sail on one of those would have been suicide, to order it out manslaughter; the Greeks never fielded any.

 

With exchange of both maps and research scrolls, what we received from one nation we could trade to another to further the process.

 

France was equally far south, Japan just as far north, Egypt somewhat in the middle of the world. Although it seemingly passed unnoticed at the time, part of India had been found between Egypt and France. The locations and extents of Celtic and Persian territory were wholly unknown then, as odd as that may seem now to people of the modern world.

 

Despite the north of the continent ending near Knossos, there was much of the same fertile grasslands and rich forests to the south; Herakleia was only the beginning of the Greek colonization in that area. The west had at least enough room for Mycenae. As those cities’ new senators were seated in 4660 After Founding, the Senate expanded to thirty-two.

 

Another even number. Those who laid out the constitution of the Greek republic had of course foreseen tied votes, but perhaps hadn’t foreseen how common they’d be. Fortunately, the secondary consul, usually a political ally of the consul, had the authority to cast tiebreaking votes. That’s all that many people thought he did besides sitting around and waiting for the consul to die. However, he could also preside over Senate deliberations – that was a part of political mechanisms confusing even to some politicians, but the post did direct a lot of soft power its controller’s way.

 

It was much harder to keep order in a republic, chiefly because the public voted against military enforcers on an understandably consistent basis. As such, most garrisons had been reduced or disbanded entirely, certainly not expanded, the surplus equipment and training facilities being sold for scrap.

 

However, the freedom offered by a republic fueled much technological, economic and industrial development, more than enough to approach the problem in other ways. Building expertise could raise colossal structures for public entertainment of all sorts. Five millennia into Greek history, all but the smallest cities had one or were raising one. Spartans of today and those of that era sat on the same seats to watch the same kinds of fights, although less and less often being to the death, as part of the march of progress.

 

I felt I could speak without hubris when calling Athens not only the greatest city in the republic but the whole world, in large part because it had raised the greatest of those entertainment structures. The Globe featured some of the usual fare, but it was dedicated to the works of Goulielmakis Dorukounima. His reputation has only grown over time, but he had nevertheless been widely respected even his own time, unlike many great artists. He could write anything from masterpieces of tragic drama to riotous comedies. His histories veered closer to political propaganda and pandering to the powers-that-be than his admirers liked to admit, but they were still epic stories. The Greeks always had a strong tradition of theatre, but with the government of the era raising the Globe, it played to as large a crowd as baser entertainments.

 

It took awhile to rename the Colonial Office to the Settlement Office, but the change in its mission had long since existed in fact. Its establishments were full members of the Republic commensurate to their size. This was instead of property of the Emperor, King, or even the older larger cities as a whole.

 

Whatever they were called, many modern Greeks such as myself couldn’t quite explain why they had jammed Thessalonica on the western coast of Greece barely south of Mycenae. I suppose the two cities as they stood today may well be slightly larger than Mycenae would have been on its own, but competition between the two for the lands of the western peninsula was a continuing sore point in the Senate which required consular intervention. Ephesos and Rhodes both had much more territory to themselves going down the southwestern coast like Herakleia on the southeastern shore. Astute students of modern geography would note that the continent extended further south, the site of more cities. However, the Greek people had for centuries been happy with Lake Herakleia Australis as our southern border. There was a lot north of that to be happy about in the days of the early republic.


	4. A Stable Nation

In the three hundred and twenty years since the establishment of the Republic, the Greek nation added no new cities. Yet looking back upon that part of our past, the growth we had achieved on the land we had already claimed from the wilderness was still admirable. Past chroniclers only described the state of the world at the time of great events, so, looking back, I admit I am limited in what I can describe of the moments inbetween.

 

A great temple had been raised in Athens, right near the north bank of the River Athena, near the palace and slightly to the southwest. Yet people traveled from all over the realm to it, not just the consul and his men. It had been decorated with mythological scenes by the artist Michelangelo, to the painting what Goulielmakis Dorukounima was to the written word. Even men who had no great use for the gods besides as stories came to appreciate the murals, one of the many Greek traditions which has continued to the present day. Maybe it would be better to say a god, the further influence of that idea being a primary concept of religious thought at the time.

 

Come 5540, the Greeks had started no additional great projects. Such structures were of singular glory, and foreigners sometimes built them first. Also, learned people needed to develop the concepts embodied in those grand physical constructs.

 

Roads had already linked most of Greece, but during the time of the Republic, paths were laid to and from Herakleia in the far south. Pharsalos to Sparta could now be traversed along the south bank of the River Spartacus as well as the north. However, Rhodes was still only connected by the north road to Athens and northwest road to Ephesos, instead of directly to Argos in the northeast or Herakleia in the southeast.

 

The irrigation networks also continued to grow during this time, along those very roads. The water ditches did not need the roads to function, just connections to water sources. Much terrain needed both, and irrigation workers were amongst the people the roads facilitated travel for.

 

It must have been maddening to my predecessors to have maps of much of the foreign world, but not the territories nearest Greece. The Japanese showed their realm as far to the north as we were to the south. The Egyptians did not touch the Artic as we bordered the Antartic, but they were also distant from us. The French were far to the south, but connected by vast expanses of empty land. There was the Indian settlement of Madras near the Egyptian border; it had been assumed that India lay between Egypt and France especially given other signs of human settlement in the area. Any educated people of any civilization would recognize the roads and canals. In that era, there had been no word from or about the location of the Celts or Persians.

 

Around 5500, population counts to establish Senate representation were changed to being held every decade instead of every other. Even that seemed odd these days, after every five years, then every two, then every year going into the modern era.

 

In 5540, a particularly auspicious 67 men and women took their seats in the Senate Chamber of the National Palace. Rather, what they did would go down in histories even before this one. They voted overwhelmingly for more-direct control, to be exercised by the Greek people, or at least local officials instead of the ones in Athens. Well, at least the Greeks who were new to the Senate did. Many who had served for ages were old men invested in old ways.

 

People had been stubborn since the gods had made them, and so had the gods themselves. From what I could tell of foreign beliefs as they percolated into Greece, they often held their deity or deities to be perfect, all-knowing and all-powerful. _Someone had to be wrong when they all insisted they were right in saying contradictory things._ Whereas we saw ours as having some human faults but on a larger scale.

 

Distance from the capitol had spawned some corruption that reduced contribution to both the national treasury and to national research efforts. In the modern era, economic theorists argued that these were one and the same, some of the nation’s taxes spent on science, but the study of resources was not so advanced at the time. Whenever this concept was developed, it went to illustrate how many specialists prioritize their own field.

 

The corruption wasn’t much, not enough to merit courthouse construction as a symbol of law enforcement efforts to minimize it, but it still benefitted the nation to be completely rid of it. The nation was small and centered around the capital – that and the spirit of the republic had already minimized the problem.

 

Symbols of government seemed to make people happy. This was seen around the palace, and this was in Athens, already calmed by the Globe Theater. Maybe courthouses were called for in other cities after all. This was all instead of merely pacifying angry citizens as in the old days, when it was often the government making them angry in the first place.

 

Our wise men weren’t the first to think of the concept of Democracy. It seems lost to time whether the Egyptians or the Indians were. It certainly hadn’t been the Japanese or Persians; they seemed to have achieved a particularly low technology level. The other nations were at least comparable to ours, and we all explored slightly different paths of knowledge anyways. Combining those paths had been much of the advantage of trading technology ever since the days when the embassy was established.

 

Whoever had developed Democracy first, our nation had been the first to apply the concept. Then as now, the democratic reforms seemed like mostly harmless tweaks to improve the structure of the republic, but the benefits reaped promptly established the amendments in the public consciousness.


	5. Another Technological Revolution

**Part V – Another Technological Revolution – From 5540 AF to 5873 AF**

 

            It seemed that the three hundred and thirty-three years since the democratic reforms had seen more progress than the five thousand five hundred and forty before. Such was a testament to the power of technologies.

 

            That era also bore truth to the continuing power of diplomacy. By that time, the Celts had revealed a map of their realm. Phillippi Spartacus, Prime Minister at the time, immediately noted with wonder the details thereof. It was even closer than past generations of Greeks had hoped.

 

            As suspected, it was to the west of the Mycenae-Thessalonica peninsula. However, it was so close that modern ships could traverse the strait in barely any time at all. This would make for more-efficient trading. However, it could also make for war without warning and with easier logistics, so that Prime Minister was the first to take clear steps towards dreams of Greek conquest.

 

            The technological developments of the era included those in military theory and equipment. The Army and Navy had devised a collaboration wherein infantry would be able to fight as soon as disgorged from transport ships onto the shore.

 

Previous strategies of landing troops, especially those with heavy equipment, would have left the deployed forces vulnerable to enemy counterattack before being able to strike. With these tactics, forces could land directly in an occupied enemy city. Also, older weapons of war were useful for primarily attack or defense, ill-suited to both. To complement the others’ vulnerability, an invasion force would have had to been diluted into about half of each. Thus, earlier leaders would have found invasions unfeasible even knowing of conveniently located foreigners. _Well, the foreigners would of course find it inconvenient_ , one might realize. Indeed. It was not sensible to ignore the realities of the rest of the world in the name of national pride.

 

At the dawn of modern democracy, the Greeks already had gunpowder. However, guns received incremental improvements like many other inventions. Original firearms and artillery had smooth barrels and fired spherical projectiles. Modern barrels have spiral grooves and pointed bullets or shells for improved accuracy and range. Powder and projectile were combined into cartridges and made easier to light. Chemists developed powder that left far less smoke in the air and far less residue in the parts of the weapon. Gunsmiths developed automatics which could load and fire the next shot, and semi-automatics which could load the next shot so it was ready to fire.

 

The first division of Marines, the only one as of 5873 AF, was raised at Pharsalos and stood as that city’s only guard while Army commands throughout the country began training units of modern mobile riflemen. Musketeers still watched the northern coast at Delphi and Pharsalos. Thermopylae, Sparta, Ephesos and Herakleia, had been left undefended at the time. That was not truly a matter of great concern, as it may seem to minds less skilled in the art. Those cities were not near an even slightly worrisome border, the old weapons wouldn’t have done much, and the men and materiel of those units could be released to other projects, whether or not that meant the Army modernization initiative.

 

Anything, not just weapons, could be produced more efficiently thanks to the industrial revolution of the age. Those developments were first seen in France, but quickly spread to Greece and the relatively civilized rest of the world. Manufacturing machines, concentrated in factories, led to a material wealth never before seen in the history of the world.

 

How that wealth accrued to a few immensely rich businesspeople at the expense of masses of underpaid overworked commoners in dangerous conditions was one of the darker eras of human history, to be sure, but once law controlled those excesses, industrialization became even more of a boon to society overall.

 

Industrialization was not quite so great an invention as controlled fire, agriculture, alcoholic beverages, the wheel, or writing. However, I feel that other historians do not seem wrong in listing it amongst such august company. It is not entirely a joke to include intoxicating beverages in the list. Even a few percent concentration kills off some waterborne disease, making booze safer than polluted water.

 

Many people had left their farms to find work in the factories. To them, even the brutal conditions of early factories seemed to compare favorably to subsistence agriculture. This shift had to do with modern machinery reducing the human labor demands of farms along with other parts of society. During this era, many women, urban or rural, began working outside their homes for the first time.

 

This seemed to contribute to the first wave of the modern gynaikist movement. That phase was most commonly associated with womens’ right to vote, which Athens and the rest of Greece had apparently secured first in the world. It certainly calmed the protestors. As such, a statue of women waving banners and placards seemed particularly appropriate. It seemed better than the abstract female symbol of the Aphrodite mirror, a large circle atop a small cross.

 

That same statue still stands behind the National Palace, north of Warrior Road. That wave was also known for lifting some of the other most barbaric legal restrictions on women, especially those that put wives under the control of their husbands. While later gynaikists were still mindful of sexist laws, the second wave seemed more focused on cultural restrictions on womens’ roles, and the third wave often took a holistic focus on gender combined with other issues such as age, class, race and Sapphic status.

 

That was hardly the only new structure which glorified Athens, either as symbolic of larger deeds or as great constructions in their own right.

 

Ioannis Bach expressed myth through music like Michelangelo had with murals, another calming influence on the people through the arts.

 

Karolos Darwin’s interests lay in science instead of religion; indeed, his work often brought him into conflict with the priests and their followers. His evolutionary theory provided a more convincing explanation for the development of living things than did creation myths. While Darwin did not make claims about the initial origin of life, he did explain how it took the variety it had. Myth had arisen partially as a way to explain the natural world, but mythmongers were loath to drop those explanations in favor of better ones. Karolos’ knowledge developed while traveling aboard the Beagle, a naval vessel in an exploration role. That journey proved to be the most significant sea voyage since Magellan set forth from Armagh, a city on a river near the far west coast of Celtic territories.

 

Moving water was not the only way to generate electricity, but it was a good one, not belching pollutants like heavy smoke such as many other methods, and higher-capacity and more reliable than many other clean methods. It was also poetic, given history. Machines powered by moving water were a key aspect of the industrial revolution. Harnessing electricity was a later development. While many factories located themselves along the banks of the Athena, Spartacus or lesser rivers, the available territory was still limited, a constraint not faced by electric power. A massive dam, the Hoover, was built upriver from Athens. It provided power to the whole nation’s factories, which increased productivity cheaper and more cleanly than many other possible methods. Also, its massive height could contain all or most of the floodwaters that used to ravage Athens.

 

Along with power, however harnessed, railroads had also been essential to the industrial revolution. The development seemed to build on the great Greek roads, sometimes literally, as train tracks were laid down along the same paths. This enabled the rapid movement of mass quantities of raw materials and finished goods that modern industry called for. Also, the organization of rail firms foreshadowed many developments in business and other aspects of society. Like the roads, people military or civilian could travel between the cities much more quickly, but a further acceleration of the concept.

 

Modern engineering led to quicker and more advanced construction, including their noncombat uses of explosives. Engineer units of the Greek Army were the best choice to build the railroads, especially since the Athenian Army Academy was for a while the only school of engineering in the country. However, the engineer and the railroad were not inherently tied to each other; nations might have developed either first.

 

By 5873, the railroads did not yet run north to Knossos, west to Mycenae or Thermopylae, northeast to Corinth, or south to Rhodes or Herakleia. Yet there was progress to connecting the whole of Greece. A spur north of Thermopylae helped harvest the resources of the forest there, a line extended west to Knossos within three decades if that. This placement was an example of combining the resource and transportation benefits of trains, also seen elsewhere on the national rail map.

 

The Pharsalos Engineer Battalion had already built up to the forest northeast of Rhodes, and some tracks through those woods would connect that city. The unit from Corinth was nearly as close to Herakleia; it was the Delphi engineers driving spikes to link Corinth itself. Rhodes and Herakleia would eventually be linked via rails through the forests that were south of both cities. A spur east of Mycenae ran up to the woods between it and Pharsalos. That line, once completed, would prove essential for transporting those destined to take the sea to the Celtic lands. However, while Engineers worked faster than Settlers, they still took more time through forests than over grasslands.

After those projects, they would make further improvements to the national irrigation system and expand Greek settlement southwards.

 

Darwin had discussed natural selection, how the variations of life best suited to their environment had survived, the variations building upon one another over eons. Humanity had developed the technology to make such selections artificially and rapidly. I saw it as an extension of the domestication and breeding practices that had been essential to farming since the dawn of history. To humans, there seemed nothing more natural than affecting nature. Greeks had pioneered the methods of modern artificial selection by genetic engineering. This had shown immense potential for curing disease, particularly the ravages of cancers, leading to another milestone of human happiness.

 

Still no more new cities had been established, but the existing ones and thus their Senate representation had continued growing. The chamber now held 161. Athens chose fifteen, Sparta seventeen, Thermopylae fourteen, Corinth twelve, Delphi fourteen, Pharsalos ten, Knossos ten, Argos sixteen, Mycenae twelve, Herakleia twelve, Ephesos twelve, Thessalonica six, and Rhodes eleven. Those senators voted 131 to 30 that foreign cities would ascend to the Greek republic as equal members, and in the same bill, for a buildup of the Marines that would help persuade this occurrence.


	6. To The Shores Of Caernarfon

**Part VI – To The Shores Of Caernarfon – From 5873 AF to 5903 AF**

 

            The Greeks went to the shores of Caernarfon in 5903 AF. Thus began the first foreign war in our history. It was likely that Druid Boadicea of the Celts had taken the bait of diplomatic provocation, and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force had sunk the hook in.

 

            The transport fleet had been built in the shipyards of Delphi and gathered at Mycenae. It could hold a full sixteen divisions, so of course that’s what was launched. Every man was needed. Each of the units had seen combat – ten had been annihilated on their sections of the front, and four had sustained heavy losses. The 1st Pharsalos had led the charge and sustained some of the heaviest losses, having faced some of the strongest defenses. Supposedly, some of the first men on the beaches were grizzled veteran officers who had been amongst the initial enlistees decades prior.

 

As charted, once the city had been secured, the ships had plenty of fuel left to make port there. Many wounded Marines and retreating units had made it back to their landing craft instead of either falling or marching into the city. They would have otherwise been vulnerable to a naval counterattack. The destroyer G.S.S Delphi, steaming right out of its namesake city, had sighted no Celtic naval elements to the north, but wouldn’t have been able to patrol further south or link up with our flotilla as a whole.

 

After the bitter battle for the city itself, the exhausted infantry only could muster enough strength to clear some of the territory immediately surrounding Caernarfon. Yet the Greek commanders of the time had been pleased with the extent of those skirmishes. It limited their potential for counterattack or to scour the land as they retreated. Railroad lines were important on the home front and would be nearly as useful for moving troops around _enemy_ territory, deploying them to the frontlines and moving them to defensible positions. This required that the Celtic tracks could be kept intact.

 

Armed civilians still filled the countryside. I doubted the purpose of this. It seemed they would likely be no more than a nuisance to any professional military, let alone a force as elite as our Marines.

 

Even when law did not restrict civilians from owning the most powerful weapons they could afford, even when they made themselves well equipped and trained by nonmilitary standards, it seemed futile. What was the sense in dying for that? It played into fantasies of patriotism, an admirable impulse to be sure. Yet in general when an ideal contradicted reality, it was a fool’s errand to ignore the truths in question. It stung to be slandered for being sensible.

 

            This was when they rose against a foreign invader. Gun enthusiasts insisted that such patriots were a threat to even domestic forces. That seemed an even more difficult struggle. External troops faced challenges in logistics and lack of local knowledge that enemies from the same country would not.

 

            Such armed civilians insisted that it was a useful method for resisting unconscionable government action. Yet people had enough trouble defining what that was or wasn’t without turning to violence.

 

            The arms and armor of the government man and the citizen had been on more-equal footing centuries prior, so the practical arguments once held more weight. Now it seemed like another case of a tradition that hadn’t evolved along with the changing society.

 

Along with many other people, I feared that it would encourage resistance to rightful government action. Men who took their gods far too seriously were more than enough of a danger to civil society even when not armed to the teeth. There were many other elements of society that were also too inclined to engage in major violations of others’ rights for what seemed like incidental protections of their own.

 

            They seemed to hold a similar paranoia about common street criminals. While decent citizens often stopped thugs, those who fancied themselves as such were often too quick to fire on targets that were mostly harmless or at least did not call for lethal force. Also, the deranged criminals were often the armed and dangerous ones; a madman with a semiautomatic could wreak much more havoc than one with, say, a switchblade.

 

            Hunting and target shooting were fine hobbies if that’s what piqued one’s interest. The former could very well be a valuable food source for some folks. However, they were not the crux of the issue. It seemed disingenuous to invoke those traditions to support the proliferation of weapons designed to be fired at people instead of game or decorated papers.

 

            To partially control them seemed like an ineffective proposition, as it seemed too hard to allow particular weapons to be generally available while still keeping them out of the wrong hands – theft, straw purchases, smuggling between areas with different restrictions, those who the investigations missed, and so on. I agreed with the gun activists that such policies were ineffective, yet I felt that called for stronger rather than weaker ones.

 

            The massacres in the late 5800’s had been sorrowful, yet I was glad they had brought the Greeks of that era to their senses. War was grim to be sure, but sometimes served some purpose as opposed to pointless chaos in homeland streets.

 

            Right now, there was chaos in foreign streets. Securing Caernarfon had meant making the situation no worse than mass domestic riots. Also, the battle had destroyed many structures that a city normally used to help maintain order. The mass hiring of entertainers had left a grave food deficit that would need to be filled as soon as possible, by rebuilding those structures along with those for efficient food distribution. Further military operations would occupy the best farmland surrounding the city.

 

            The Prime Minister, with Senate approval, nominated 18 representatives of Caernarfon. As planned, this is the same amount that any of its size would get; only Sparta at 19 had more. They would be put up for the usual elections at the usual time, but the nominations helped get us off to a start that was safe for Greece, especially given the chaos of the initial occupation. 18 native Celts joined 180 native Greeks, including 1 for our then-new southern colony of Eritrea, founded 5899.

 

            Some engineers had constructed the new city itself, while other units were beginning to improve the terrain around it. However, there were still some deployed to the north. Thessalonica had long since lacked for industrial resources, so the engineer unit from Pharsalos had planted forests to run railroads through, while other continued irrigating the land in the heart of the country.

 

            To imitate the birds, let alone fly higher than them, had long since been one of the aspirations of humanity. By the 5800’s, we had taken to the air, though Greeks were not to do it first. Knowing our species, we had taken weapons up with us. The Greek Air Force had seen its first action as part of the capture of Caernarfon. Its inaugural unit, the 1st Athens Fighter Wing, rained lead on some of the partisan positions outside the city. Larger craft to drop heavy explosives, the 1st Athens Bomber Wing, had been built later and flew slower. At the time of the Caernarfon strikes, the bombers were at an airstrip in Sparta, not able to deploy for a couple years’ time.

 

            In 5904, the High Command would be ready to launch the 2nd Expeditionary Force, though with four divisions instead of eight. Granted, the 3rd and 4th Sparta, along with the 1st Herakleia and 3rd Athens, would simply have to strengthen our then-existing position instead of create a new one. At the time, even the strategos were unsure how long it would take us to ready a strike on another city.

 

            Also, they had found a very good reason to interrupt the training of Marines. Mobile warfare had been the biggest change in military theory since gunpowder. It called for new training facilities. Furthermore, the speed and strength of the new military vehicles would outclass most any infantry. Planes had already shown us a shadow of fast combat, a shadow that the Celts were quite concerned about after it had settled on them. Once we readied our first armored divisions, it would further speed our path through Celtic territory.


	7. Celts In Trouble

**Part VII – Celts In Trouble – From 5903 AF to 5934 AF**

 

            The Greek conquest of the Celts slowly but surely spread. The first addition to the Republic was only two years after the initial landing at Caernarfon, and was carried out entirely by the Marines.

 

The Army’s new armored divisions were not ready yet. However, some of the Army’s elite rifle units joined the second wave of Marines, mainly to reinforce the defensive positions. They seemed more needed on the Celtic front than they were garrisoning a peaceful homeland, especially considering a concurrent expansion of the home guard. Also, naval logistics had plenty of space in its transports.

 

There were no rails immediately north of Caernarfon. Like as not, they had been sabotaged by retreating Celtic partisans. The terrain had been left with just roads. Infantry could traverse them, but would not be able to reach a target or be in any condition to attack it. Mechanized units would have the speed to strike.

 

Also, there was a fortress on the road north, but no rails leading in or out of it. Battle plans would likely involve taking that fort before the nearby city of Caerphilly. Vehicles could at least advance ahead of engineers laying new tracks. This was the first combat mission of the engineers since that corps had been established decades prior. It was the Delphi Battalion that had been available for deployment. They had performed well under threat of fire. They stayed on the Celtic content, but returned to their traditional peacetime duties, improving terrain around Caernarfon.

 

As such, rather than be kept in garrison, the Marines had marched on Dinas Powys, southwest of Caernarfon. It was the only significant Celtic settlement on that peninsula. Obviously, the Greek military intended for it to fall at some point. The campaign may still have proceeded in that order, even without the logistical issues a northward strike presented at the time. This protected the western flank so more troops could be concentrated in an attack to the north. To focus offensive forces was an ancient tenet of military strategy that had served the Greeks especially well.

 

The war settled into a stalemate, as the Greek military readied its armored divisions. The infantry stationed in the south of the Celtic realm could not advance, but they could more than hold their gains against Celt probing of their lines.

 

By 5917, the Greek armor had advanced. Sixteen divisions were deployed. While the new units had much heavier equipment, they had much fewer men. So they could be ferried from Mycenae to Caernarfon in the same transports that had been used in the initial Greek assaults over a decade prior.

 

This time, lighting struck upwards. Caerphilly and the comparably large Cork were captured in the same year. Only one of the sixteen divisions had been totally destroyed, though many had taken heavy losses in men and materiel that would take years to repair. As was often the case, sending damaged units back into action too soon might lead to a far worse defeat.

 

There was a peninsula to the northeast containing the major city Kells and the town of Neath. It was now cut off from the rest of its realm, which stretched far to the north and farther to the west.

 

France was yet further to the west, Japan to the north. Greek leaders were amazed at the potential of absorbing just the Celts. It is unclear whether they also considered the French and Japanese at that time.

 

Computers had been one of the great technological developments of the age. So commonplace now, it may seem hard to grasp how revolutionary they were. Amongst other things, they were very useful for cutting-edge scientific research, or other projects that involved managing massive amounts of data.

 

We wanted to build a network of such things accessible to all research institutions in the country. Building and maintaining individual facilities was costly, and was only feasible in a few big cities. That was often a problem, and often solved by the grand structures in Athens. In 5917 A.F., Sparta was the only native Greek city with a University, along with the one in Cork. Only fourteen of the nineteen cities had proper libraries.

 

As with many of Athens’ great projects, other countries had similar aspirations. At the time, the Celts were the only foreigners with computing technology. Our patriots and theirs had argued over who invented it first, but even I had to admit that they had made the first substantial developments. The Indians had still been working on such technology, and other nations were even further behind.

 

For the eighth time in our glorious history, Athens finished its work first. It captured the people’s attention with a search for signs of alien life. Man had not left Earth yet. This was the first major sign of how space could captivate humanity to reach for a higher goal, both literally and metaphorically. Furthermore, the project harnessed spare capacity of regular peoples’ computers. This added up alongside large dedicated systems. Similar projects sprung up for earthly projects, but it was important to not lose sight of the stars.

 

Darwin spoke of evolution by natural selection. Humanity had long practiced artificial selection with the plants and animals we used, especially crops and livestock. One of our next great scientific leaps in any category was to alter genes directly instead of breed them. This was one of those technologies that offered seemingly limitless opportunities. Amongst them was a pincer attack on cancer. Genetic engineering allowed for better laboratory animals, cancer research or otherwise. Modern genetic technology could also be applied directly to the cancer-stricken. People led longer and happier lives, and friends and relatives did not have to watch them suffer. For all our advances in managing discontent, this was even better.

 

There was some expansion in the south of Greece; the new town of Troy seating two in the Senate by this point. However, there was far greater glory to be gained by expanding into territory that was already settled. There wasn’t much room left in the homeland. A few marginal towns could have been established, but it didn’t seem worth competing with nearby cities for use of land between the two.  


            In 5917, the four municipalities in our Celtic province sent 67 senators to Athens. The fifteen municipalities of the homeland had 194. Many native senators and their supporters thought this was a threat to the country. Those dire warnings were proven wrong. As our Celtic holdings expanded, their people blended into our ways.

 

Seventeen years later, 5934 A.F, the Greek victories continued nearly unabated. The front line had advanced to the north and west, but the strategic plan was to secure the rest of the northern border before striking at the bulk of their western region. This could be attributed to a continuation of armor tactics, including vehicles for common riflemen as well as heavy gunners. However, advances in manufacturing included terrifyingly effective new artillery – not only were these pieces even more powerful than armored divisions, they weren’t stymied by city fortifications.

 

Machines to cool food were one of the great uses of electrical power. Those advances in food preservation were not new. However, the Greeks were just beginning to apply them – improving farmland to produce more food, building better markets to distribute it. This technology and its application were further along amongst the Celts.

 

Off the ground, the Greeks were the first to launch rockets, though not the first to carry people into space with them. We would be first to travel to the moon. The project was named after Apollo, old god of the sun. Maybe it should have been the Artemis Program instead. Either way, it would help us be a great nation on multiple worlds.


	8. Staying In The Spotlight

**Part VIII – Staying In The Spotlight – From 5934 AF to 5949 AF**

 

            On the 217th day of the 5940th year after the founding of Athens, Greeks traversed the remaining distance between the River Athena and the selenar surface. It was late evening that fateful day. “Ataraxia Station present. Aetos just made contact.” It can be easy to forget how extraordinary and risky that accomplishment was, the massive effort over many years that had preceded it.

 

We saw grainy black and white video and heard scratchy audio – television based on Gaia was much more advanced by this time, but transmission was one of the myriad of technical problems faced by those early explorers of space. Hundreds of millions of people watched, out of a world population of a few billion. (It is important to note that population figures often cite just the tens of millions living directly in major cities.) Tens of millions, maybe a couple hundred million, watch the most major of sporting events. I enjoyed Olympic gold medal matches but was relieved at evidence of people understanding what was truly important.  


Neil Brachodynami and Edwin Aldrin were ready to leave their landing craft later than night, or early the next morning depending upon how one wished to look at it. Neil was first to step into the gray dust. “A short walk for me, a major journey for humankind,” he intoned.

 

The two men to walk the Moon had been fighter pilots in the Celtic war. Like many astronauts (though not Edwin), Neil had been involved in extreme atmospheric flying that left him particularly well-suited to challenge space. Edwin had graduated from the Athenian Army Academy a few years before the Air Force got its own such institution.

 

At the time, I was one of many senators from Athens. However, with that year’s election approaching, I was one the Hawk Party’s likely choices for Prime Minister when we won. We certainly did win, winning a majority in the Senate of over two to one. Our support was spread throughout the realm. The Celts seemed to prefer an end to the war with us winning over continuing skirmishes or their land divided between two countries. Even our opponents had the sense to not rescind our gains, though they wished to limit them. However, opposition was concentrated in some of the more recently acquired Celtic territories.

 

I was determined to accelerate our earthly accomplishments. I was resolved to not let our extraterrestrial endeavors falter after the series of moon landings. Only two years later, we had already earnestly started construction of a ship to travel to other worlds. The materials developments necessary for space travel had proven useful in earthly endeavors. The French and Persians were the only other nations that were at all competing with us on such a project, and they had completed only a few small structural parts at that point.

 

The actual use of refrigeration largely spread outwards from Athens, the agricultural improvements by far being the biggest concern of the corps of engineers, as railroads had been for a previous generation., as roads and irrigation had been for the settlers before them.

 

I was able to provide a war with the Japanese. The first strike was to direct Army howitzers to Fukushima on the north Celtic coast. Initial advantages like that were a prime reason to start war on one’s own terms. Obviously, this showed we had mostly broken through the Celts’ northern border. By this time, they only controlled Llangollen to the west and Maesteg to the east. The Japanese had long ago captured Llanelli to the southwest of Llangollen. Part of our support amongst the Celts stemmed from a desire to reunite with Llanelli, but it was not yet tactically advisable to do so. Besides, Japanese diplomats forced a cease-fire after the capture of Fukushima. This had required the cooperation of anti-Hawk obstructionists in the Greek Senate. Those senators felt like traitors, but to have them executed would have caused far worse problems.

 

Most of the howitzer divisions rested in a fortress south of Fukushima. It had been a staging area for the attack, and was not safely behind our lines. The Sparta Armored Division garrisoned a fortress to the west to hold that line. Their Corinthian comrades held Citadel Merthyr. It was the only way up and down the isthmus connecting the central and western Celtic provinces. Its towers guarded the railroad path through that territory.

 

The Celts seemed sufficiently broken that the strategos were unconcerned about any significant counterattack. The Fukushima operation merely delayed the final defeat of the Celts. Seven years later, we had pushed ever closer to the Celtic borders.

 

The Egyptians had declared against us, too, to satisfy diplomatic entanglements. However, their territory was far enough away from ours, especially compared to immediate enemies, that few Greek politicians took it seriously.

 

We had returned to open war with the Japanese. We were now at war with the French as well. This meant that the army could keep marching westward after defeating the Celts. At the time, there was no path between Swansea and Tours, but it seemed like it would be straightforward enough to take the fortress outside Tours and hold it while Greek engineers built a path to support further operations.

 

By this time, all nations except the Celts were involved in spaceship construction. Many foreigners, if they had progressed beyond frames, had built only a few engines. We had constructed a nearly full set of engines, as well as the living spaces, life support and power systems that would make the ship actually useful. It would hold ten thousand souls. This harkened back to the small band that established the Greek empire all those millennia ago. What glorious history awaited this new world?

 

Since the development of nuclear physics, scientists had considered the possibility of it yielding incredibly powerful weapons. Yet for decades, no nation wished to take such a drastic step. Out conventional weapons seemed plenty effective enough, especially considering the developments in that field.

 

Yet Boadicea’s government began developing such weapons as a last-ditch effort to save itself. Other nations soon followed. If humanity was going take that step, then the Greeks would participate in the march. It would become another project for the glory of Athens. It had not been worth partaking solely on those grounds, which added to the delay in applying that scientific possibility. Some thought of using spies to deploy the deadly devices, yet the dominant military theory was to deliver such weapons via long-range missiles. With this in mind, we rushed to build stations that could shoot down such missiles. This would leave no window in which we could be vulnerable to a nuclear strike. Nuclear weapons and defenses against them would call for even higher taxes, along with levies to support faster spaceship construction. Yet sacrifices to make this nation greater tended to be worth it.


	9. A Greater Journey

**Part IX – A Greater Journey – From 5949 AF to 5965 AF**

 

            By 5955, fifteen years after I became Prime Minister, the Greeks had reached another milestone in spaceship construction. The GSS Alexander now carried the full suite of engines allowed for by its design. The engineers had made their ship plans as big as possible. As sarcastically noted by some gynaiksts, many of the planners including the project head were men.

 

            The passengers were as equally divided between male and female as possible. The manifest focused on those of childbearing age; infertility was one category of medical issues that had been screened against. People were not expected to reproduce but it made sense to set up the group so that it would be more likely.

            To be one of the ten thousand was an incredibly coveted role. There were many times more applications submitted. It was open in both theory and practice to people from all over the realm, of whatever ethnicity and other such characteristics. We didn’t aim to precisely emulate the proportions of Greece as a whole, but we did end up with all significant groups well represented.

Exceptions to the general rules had been made for close relatives of eligible colonists, those in particularly in-demand specialties, or both.

 

            The design would have held up to four sets of modules, but we did not have time to build any more than one while still beating the foreigners there. Constructing them would have taken more time and the added weight would have slowed down the ship’s travel time. We had even invented a revolutionary new power source to speed the journey.

 

The Greeks had been the first to develop fusion power. The hard part was sustaining the reaction and getting it to produce more power than it used. It was easy for the average Greek to lose track of the significance of cold fusion with our use of hydroelectric power.

 

Fusion is even more efficient than fission and without concerns related to radioactivity. When used for space travel, there was already more than enough cosmic radiation to contend with. Whether fission or fusion, nuclear power was needed in space when operating far from a star. Carrying fuel for traditional engines had been one of the many great challenges faced by earlier space activities like the Apollo Program.

 

Fusion was harder than fission to adapt for nuclear weapons. As such, there was less concern about widespread access to the electrical power source. _It is important to note some clarifications for people even less familiar with nuclear physics than I am._ Advanced nuclear weapon designs include fusion but also a fission element; purely fission weapons were as yet unfeasible. Nuclear power could be used for ships, and most of the Greek Navy was so equipped. This was useful for things like speed and range, but was not a fundamentally different weapon.

 

By 5955, Boadicea only controlled one city on each Celtic border. Our troops were already massing near Llangollen in the north and Swansea in the south. She was called Druid now, name of a Celtic social class most known for their religious leaders. Their faith had been in and out of power. Religion often offered hope, and religious fundamentalism could mobilize military capability. So it was easy to understand why that party appealed to our foes, but it would not do them any good. Their entire nation was in our hands by 5957.

 

At this point, our longstanding state of war with the French became much more than just a diplomatic affair. Defeating the Celts _did_ put us right on the border with France. There was an advanced French bomber in the air over the ocean northwest of Swansea. The Greek air force could be kept small, since our objectives could easily be achieved by land. Also, since planes were too big to send by rail, they tended to be deployed closer to home.

 

During this era, a pollution problem was one of our bigger internal concerns, and cleaning it up was a primary mission of our engineers. It limited the productivity of particular pieces of land. More importantly, it could add up to catastrophic effects on the climate of the planet as a whole.

Hydropower meant no belching smoke into the air and no nuclear accidents. However, electricity generation was not the only source of fouled atmosphere. The automobile was the worst thing to happen to the atmosphere since horse feces. Proper mass transit systems essentially eliminated this problem, but they were a major undertaking to build.

Part of the chaos of the Celtic war was destruction of pollution prevention systems, and distraction from building new ones or cleaning up the existing messes.

 

Work on the spaceship frame continued throughout those years, and the GSS Alexander was finally launched in 5958. A Celtic band played at the spaceport, having just the song for the occasion – “If I Ever Leave This World Alive”. It was meant metaphorically, but many could not resist taking it literally with regards to space travel. Most of its members were Greeks of Celtic ancestry, relatives who had traveled to our realm long ago. Their leader had traveled here recently, and was relieved to see a waning of the conflict in his homeland.

“May the gods be with you. Science sure seems to,” I said right before the ship commander fired its engines.

 

I had long since planned to retire from Greek politics once the spaceship landed. I was similarly determined to leave my successor in good stead with regards to terrestrial affairs. In 5964, we were making progress against both the French and Japanese. We had pushed into the border city of Tours. The road from Swansea had aided immensely and could be upgraded to rail soon enough. From there we could use France’s own railroads to access the rest of their realm. We had taken the Japanese-held Celt city of Llanelli easily enough, but it would be harder to get to the rest of Japan. It wasn’t the rail hub that Tours was, and there were Japanese troops massed on the border.

 

            We finally received reports of the spaceship touching down. “Nike! Nike! Nike!” the crowd chanted, repeating the name of the ancient goddess of victory. Scientific insights were often heralded by shouts of “Eureka!” meaning _I have found it_. The euphoria of both were in the air right now. Both were sensations the Greek people were quite familiar with, but in a new realm.


End file.
